It came with an insert with lyrics and liner notes. I’m in the process of typing up the lyrics and adding them to LyricWikia, but I noticed the notes are nowhere to be found on the Google (unfortuantely Discogs does not allow publishing of liner notes because of potential copyright issues).

The notes are particularly interesting, in that they provide a partial clue to the jigsaw, aiding in interpretation of the lyrics in their written form.

Words in full caps are PRIME-ZONES. Coumcepts ov prime importance in thee materialisation ov that which we call MIND, or consciousness. Words with a cap-at thee front are Sub-Zones. These relate to states ov MIND or consciousness that access MIND it-self. Words with no cap, even if they appear at thee begining ov a line are non-zones. Comcepts relating to control and thee trapping ov MIND within illusional reality. Thus thee choice ov caps creates a system ov definitions describing thee systems within a T.O.P.Y. framework. Three Rations ov actuality. Hyphens are used to reveal meaning and resonance with greater clarity. Part ov thee jigsaw is thee cosmology coumtained within thee text. “He”, “She”, “I”, “His”, “Hers”, all becoum E and “my” becoums me. Thee interface ov any individual with collective will or E-story is prefaced with WE.

I subscribed to the Philadelphia Daily News to get access to their “Digital Replica,” which is essentially a PDF of every issue loaded into a clunky ASP/Flash application. Fortunately they provide a download option for PDFs. Unfortunately, they only expose access to the past month of issues. Which seems to severely limit the usefulness of such an application to me. But, as I’ll explain a little later, I only need the past month of PDFs.

By chance, I discovered not only that it’s possible to access PDFs not exposed by their application, but it’s also possible to access these without authentication. Yes, they are publicly available.

I wouldn’t have discovered this were it not for me installing the PDF Viewer extension in Chrome last week, to avoid dealing with Chrome’s horrible PDF support. PDF Viewer doesn’t automatically download the PDF and open it locally in the browser like Chrome does. Instead, it prepends the URL and opens the file remotely. Like so:

I disabled the PDF Viewer extension and opened that URL to download today’s PDF directly.

I don’t think the archives go very far back – I tried changing the URL to get PDFs from 2013, but I kept getting the stock ASP runtime error message.

Doesn’t matter to me – I’m only interested in the PDFs from the past month, which DN already provides to its paying customers. ;)

So, for the project I’m working on – the whole reason I’ve been trying to get the Daily News Digital Replica – I needed an entire month’s worth of the print issue or a digital version of it. When I realized how easy it was to get a whole bunch of issues just by changing the date in the URL, I LOLed.

I took the URL into Sublime Text, duplicated it 30 times, then went through each and changed the dates. Then I found the Bulk URL Opener Extension for Chrome, which allows you to take a bunch of URLs separated by new lines, and open them in new tabs. Which, in my case, means downloading all of the files at once. I suppose a dedicated download manager would have been able to handle this too. But the resulting video is quite magical:

So, Philly Daily News, if you’re reading this, please know I post with the best intentions – be aware that your PDFs are available to the public.

Update: I should add, for my own reference and for the purpose of my project, that I’m missing four days due to recurring application errors:

Yes, hello. I’ve lived on the web for a long while – well at least most of my life. And yet I’ve never taken the trouble to publish a blog.

I’m a little late to the blogosphere, as some people might say. I wouldn’t.

I foresee this site being primary focused around daily work and play problems and solutions to those problems – for those problems that have solutions. One day you might see me writing about some obscure problem I encounter involving Mac OS 9 emulation, another day you might see me write about why WordPress Multisite is hella annoying to work with, and another day… well, I’d rather not pretend to look too far into whatever future our future selves might share together.